The Promoticon
McDonald's
Issue 47 | June 2018
Agency
TBWA\RAAD
Creative Team
CCO Walid Kanaan ECD Fouad Abdel Malak CD Manuel Borde Art Director ACD Oswaldo Sa Art Director Pedro Velasquez Copywriter ACD Alex Pineda Copywriter Leo Konjedic
Production Team
Producer Andreea Mititiu Head of Production Rouba Asmar Production Company Optix Dubai
Other Credits
Head of Client Services Joe Laham Regional Account Director Monisha Mirchindani Planners Maxime Menant, Remie Abdo
Date
2017
Background
After its launch in the Gulf region, the McDelivery app faced a real challenge with a multitude of generic delivery apps like Talabat, UberEats and Deliveroo appearing more agile and tempting people with interesting promotions and offers.
McDonald’s customers could see no real reason to have the app on their phones and, if they downloaded it, soon went back to ordering through the call centre or through a competitive app.
Idea
To get people to download the app and continue to refer to it, the idea was to keep changing the app icon. Every time it changed, people could get for free what the app depicted. If the icon was a Big Mac, then you could order a free Big Mac. If it showed fries, you got the fries free. The same with McNuggets and a range of other McDonald’s products. Whenever they became the app icon, they were up for grabs with no complicated promotion codes or coupons.
Results
Downloads went through the roof. Consumers quickly adopted the Promoticon with a 65% increase in app downloads from the previous month, making it the top pick in the App store.
Ordering through the app increased 200% across the region and increased 459% in Kuwait within the first week of the Promoticon campaign.
In the same period, there were 125,000 social interactions across the region as people began to lobby for the next icon.
25% of the app’s users came back for regular repeat purchases.
Our Thoughts
Anything and everything can be an advertising medium, even the little app tile on your smartphone. Cheap, easy, fun and free. You don’t often get all four of those virtues in one place at one time.